Miles Parks

Colin Marshall/NPR

Miles Parks is a reporter and producer on NPR's Washington Desk. He covers election interference and voting infrastructure and reports on breaking news.

Miles joined NPR as the 2014-15 Stone & Holt Weeks Fellow. Since then, he's investigated FEMA's efforts to get money back from Superstorm Sandy victims, profiled budding rock stars, and produced for all three of NPR's weekday news magazines.

A graduate of the University of Tampa, Miles also previously covered crime and local government for The Washington Post and The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla.

In his spare time, Miles likes playing, reading and thinking about basketball. He wrote The Washington Post's obituary of legendary women's basketball coach Pat Summitt.

Rick Gates, the marquee witness of Paul Manafort's trial, remained in the spotlight on Tuesday as he walked jurors through the intricate international financial web that Gates says he and Manafort spun to commit bank and tax fraud together.

As Manafort's former business partner and right-hand man, Gates testified in granular detail about how the two men used bank accounts in Cyprus and a middleman lawyer nicknamed "Dr. K" to hide and receive payments from Ukrainian oligarchs.

When it's the former campaign chairman for the current president of the United States, however, and it's the first trial brought by a special counsel tasked with investigating Russian interference in American democracy, things are a bit more interesting.

After an initial focus on Paul Manafort's lavish spending, including on luxury suits and home landscaping, the former Trump campaign chairman's trial has now moved squarely into the heart of his alleged financial crimes

On Day 4 of the federal trial Friday in Alexandria, Va., jurors heard from two of Manafort's former tax accountants, Cindy Laporta and Philip Ayliff. Their testimony directly addressed the bank and tax fraud charges the government has brought against Manafort.

When Russian hackers targeted the staff of Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., they took aim at maybe the most vulnerable sector of U.S. elections: campaigns.

McCaskill's Senate staff received fake emails, as first reported by The Daily Beast, in an apparent attempt by Russia's GRU intelligence agency to gain access to passwords. McCaskill released a statement confirming the attack but said there is no indication the attack was successful.

House Republicans confronted two of President Trump's top economic advisers on trade on Thursday, while also breathing a sigh of relief after the administration's decision to begin easing tensions with Europe a day earlier.

A bloc of conservative House Republicans filed articles of impeachment on Wednesday against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, escalating their war against federal law enforcement to new heights.

The group of 11 lawmakers, led by Freedom Caucus leaders Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have been threatening to file impeachment articles for months. They say Rosenstein is withholding documents from Congress and has mishandled the 2016 election investigations.

President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that the president's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, "should cooperate" with prosecutors, and that if he tells the truth, Trump has nothing to worry about.

Giuliani made the television rounds Sunday morning, appearing on three different programs, as speculation grew louder last week that Cohen was inching closer to criminal charges and possibly working out a deal with prosecutors.

"Michael Cohen should cooperate with the government," Giuliani said on ABC's This Week.

When Congress approved giving $380 million to states to bolster the security of their elections, state officials were caught off guard but extremely grateful. Elections are notoriously underfunded and haven't seen a windfall like this from the federal government in more than a decade.

But getting that money out to all the states, and then into the hands of localities that run the elections, with enough time to have a meaningful effect on the 2018 midterm elections is a difficult proposition.

The Trump administration's decision to separate children from their families as a way to curb illegal immigration is adding fuel to an already fiery debate over immigration.

A group of House Democrats converged on an immigration detention facility in New Jersey on Sunday, days before a planned vote by House Republicans next week. Meanwhile, Trump administration officials alternately took credit and sought to distance the administration from the family separation policy.

After one White House adviser said there was "a special place in hell" for foreign leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and another said Trudeau "stabbed us in the back," Canadian leaders offered a measured — even polite — response.

President Trump says that, on Monday, he will order an investigation into whether the FBI and the Department of Justice "infiltrated or surveilled" his campaign "for political purposes," potentially setting up a showdown between the president and his intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Roger Stone, a longtime adviser of President Trump, complained of partisan behavior by special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation on Sunday, but also speculated that he could be under investigation by Mueller for a crime unrelated to coordinating with Russia leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

"It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime, pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election," Stone said, in an appearance on NBC's Meet The Press.

When a WWE wrestler, especially one known for his demonic antics and a move called the "tombstone piledriver," runs for mayor of your county, you know your election is going to get more attention than usual.

But in Knox County, Tenn., it wasn't the fact that Glenn Jacobs, also known to wrestling fans as Kane, was running for mayor that gained national attention on the county primary day, May 1.

Two years after Russia's wave of cyberattacks against American democracy, a Senate committee investigating election interference says those hackers hit harder than previously thought in several states.

The committee also added that it still doesn't know with complete certainty exactly how much of U.S. voting infrastructure was compromised.

As America heads toward the 2018 midterms, there is an 800-pound gorilla in the voting booth.

Despite improvements since Russia's attack on the 2016 presidential race, the U.S. elections infrastructure is vulnerable — and will remain so in November.

Cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier laid out the problem to an overflowing room full of election directors and secretaries of state — people charged with running and securing elections — at a conference at Harvard University this spring.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is joining President Trump's legal team to help deal with the ongoing special counsel investigation into whether Trump's campaign conspired with the Russian attack on the 2016 election.

"Rudy is great," Trump said in a statement released by his attorney Jay Sekulow. "He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country."

President Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has dropped a pair of defamation lawsuits he filed after BuzzFeed News published the infamous Russia dossier last year.

The embattled lawyer isn't conceding anything about the substance of what was detailed in the dossier, which is unverified, but says he has too much else on his plate to proceed now that he is dealing with a federal court case in New York.

"The decision to voluntarily discontinue these cases was a difficult one," said a lawyer for Cohen, David Schwartz.

Federal judge Kimba Wood ordered an attorney for Cohen to reveal the identity of a client that Cohen's team had withheld in earlier court documents as part of a dispute over evidence seized by the FBI from Cohen's home and office earlier this month.

Just a few hours before James Comey's first television appearance ahead of his new book's release, President Trump published a string of tweets calling Comey a "slimeball" and saying the notes the former FBI director says he took were "fake."

At an event billed as a roundtable discussion about taxes in West Virginia, President Trump went off script Thursday afternoon, and notably repeated a claim about voter fraud that has repeatedly been proven false.

"In many places, like California, the same person votes many times — you've probably heard about that," Trump said. "They always like to say 'oh that's a conspiracy theory' — not a conspiracy theory folks. Millions and millions of people."